Sunday, November 03, 2013

On Saturday 2 November 2013, Heffers bookshop sponsored the Second Classics Fact, Fiction and Children's Literary Festival, featuring luminaries like Mary Beard, Simon Scarrow and Lindsey Davis. One of the events was a balloon debate. Five of us were asked to plead the case of a character from Classical mythology and all but one of us would be chucked out of the balloon. I spent several hours crafting a moving plea for my chosen heroine, Andromache. I even brought a black scarf to throw over my head à la Leighton's moving painting.

Andromache in exile by Frederick Lord Leighton

I am Andromache. My name means Battle of MenThough perhaps it should be battle of brothersI had seven of them: a quiver full.I had to be strong, growing up with that lot.I heard them plan hunting trips as I sat at my loomAnd my shuttle became a hunting spear in the thickets of warp and weft.

I heard them plan raiding expeditions as I sat at my spindleAnd my winding skein was a file of men on a mountain path.

I saw them slaughtered by Achilles in one afternoonAlong with my fatherWhile my hands were red up to the elbowsIn a simmering cauldron of dying beetles with its floating strands of yarn.

My life unraveled; the woe unwove me.And when Artemis slew my motherNothing was left but an empty loomA bare frame of my life… A taut spare web of grief.Then you came, Hector. You became not just my husband,But my father, my mother, my brothers.You let me weave my unraveling weft into your strong warp.And we became a new tapestry together. You took me away a place of happy memoriesMade hateful by the son of PeleusAnd you brought me to high-towered Troy.

We had a son, a little lord of the citadel.I called him Astyanax, you called him ScamandriusAfter the river where we once picnickedA buzzing, honey-scented afternoon, among the asphodel.

My brothers taught me about the huntBut you taught me about war.You, and your house of strong women:Hecuba, the matriarchCassandra, never afraid to speak her mindHelen, the sister-in-law from HadesSparta, rather… Same thing.And at the end Polyxena, who boldly went to her sacrifice.

The last time I saw you Hector, the timeyou frightened our son with you horsehair plumeI begged you not to seek the thick of battle making me a widow and our son an orphanBut to guard the part of the wall by the wild fig treeWhere three attempts had previously been madeBy the crafty Greeks. But did you listen to my strategy? No. You went outAnd got yourself killed by Achilles.

Not long after that, they took our little boy upthe last remaining tower to throw him off.But before they could lay hands on him,he stepped into air of his own volition.Lord of the citadel to the very end.More courageous than a thousand Greeks.

And now the son of the man who killed my husbandMy father and my seven brothersHas taken me as his prize.The psychopath son of Achilles, Neoptolemus: Red-haired, hot-headed, cold-blooded Pyrrhus.

Hector foretold my future: To ply the loom for another womanAnd carry a heavy water jug to and from the fountain.Jostled by laughing children and happy families.To remain childless or worse yet, bear children to a man whose house murdered my house.

I am a “paragon of misery”. I do not fear death. I pray for it.Like my brave little boy, I would throw myself from the ramparts of TroyOr even from your balloon. That would be true bravery.But if you judge me worthy, I will do something even braver: I will live.

props did not help me!

How did I do? Well, Prof Paul Cartledge cannily chose the Odysseus' faithful dog, Argos. How many British would vote to save a poor pooch being tossed from the balloon? A goodly number. Ruth Downie chose Dido and won the vote of all women who've ever been lied to and abandoned by a cad like Aeneas. (Quite a few, as it turned out.) Rugby-loving, football-referencing Harry Sidebottom plumped for Hector: thick but noble, (and doomed). He got a robust number of masculine votes. But the deserved winner was witty, Diet-Coke-fuelled Natalie Haynes, who moonlights as a stand up comic and Booker Prize Judge. She made a moving and impassioned plea for Odysseus.